TITLE: The stage is yours
NAME: Teemu Tommola
COUNTRY: Finland
EMAIL: teemu.tommola@siba.fi
TOPIC: Minimalism
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: ttstage.jpg
ZIPFILE: ttstage.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    Povray for Windows v3.5

TOOLS USED: 
    Finale 2002 (sheet music), Moray for Windows v3.5 (some modelling)

RENDER TIME: 
    2 hrs 49 min

HARDWARE USED: 
    1.41 GHz Pentium 4, 192 MB of RAM


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
    As a professional musician, I am used to go on stage and I
enjoy meeting the audience. But before the concert - when the hall is empty - I
sometimes feel just a tiny little man of minimal importance to the musical life
of this world. This picture is about that feeling.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

The topic brought minimalism as a musical style to my mind. I played some time
with the idea of placing a little piano on a copy of Erik Satie's Vexations, an
early classic of minimalism (it is a short piece to be played 840 times in
succession), but the concept seemed to me quite dry and of little visual
interest, so I dropped Satie (well, it is on the piano, but you can't read it
unless you render the scene at 10000x5000 or something) and started
brainstorming on the idea about a minimal piano.

I put some more time on textures, lighting and radiosity than I have done
before. The stage has an enhanced version of a floor texture I used on the
March-April round. (It still does not look so good in a light that is coming
from behind the camera, but it is better now.) There are about 80-90 spotlights
in the scene, most of them placed so that they do not add much to the rendering
time. The rendering is slowed down, though, by focal blur, which I had to use,
not so much for the blurring, but to get the music right (initially it looked
an awful mess of black scribble on white paper).

I had used Moray last year to model the piano and the lamp hanging on top of it.
Everything else was modelled in POV for this round. Most of the objects are
CSG. Sweeps were used in the piano chair and the pencil. The curtain is a
Bezier patch.

The seats were placed with two loops and some trigonometrics. Also the placing
of the numerous little lights - and most of the whole architecture, actually -
was made in the same way, by creating things on one axis and rotating them to
the right places.

